


And You'll Be All Right

by alianovnaromanova



Series: A Little Corner of Hell's Kitchen [2]
Category: Marvel, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Charles is annoying but thats ok, Do not let pietro cook, Erik's life, F/M, M/M, Minor Character Death, Moira Mactaggert is a badass, Thank god for moira, i love this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 23:26:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10581684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alianovnaromanova/pseuds/alianovnaromanova
Summary: Erik goes through ups and downs through his life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Ok so a big thanks to El, who is my AMAZING beta, who helped me turn this fic into a readable thing and gave me the cutest ideas to include. Look out for their heavier involvement in this series ;).

Erik Lehnsherr was born in Frankfurt, Germany in the spring of 1937. He was 6 when he and his parents were taken to Auschwitz, where he spent two hellish years before the Soviets liberate the camp in 1945. Of his family and the few other local people he was taken with, he’s the only one to survive. He leaves Germany for America the minute he turns 18, he changes his name and doesn’t look back. He spent the next few years in the strange country alone, thinking this was how his life was going to just be.

But before he can truly settle into this fate he had decided for himself, he meets Charles. Annoying, talking a mile per minute, smartass Charles Xavier who worms his way into his life and refuses to leave because he is a stubborn pain in the ass. And Erik, being the idiot that he is, lets him. Their friendship begins as a begrudging companionship, the two of them reading their books in the library, Charles going to Erik’s tiny bungalow to study because he doesn’t like doing it in his dorm, going to diners and cafes to critique the grilled cheeses and milkshakes, and most other things one does with a companion. They don’t interact with others very much, Charles because most others won’t bother trying to tolerate him, and Erik because he doesn’t like other people very much. They end up living together after Charles graduates, as Charles works in a public school making little money, and Erik making jewelry and selling it to local shops. He finds he loves his time with Charles, enjoying the domestic simplicity of sharing a home and a life with a person he cares about. The arrangement, which was never supposed to be permanent, lives on for a while, the two finding that they live well together. It’s the first happiness Erik knows in years.

He meets his wife Magda when he’s 34 and she’s 32. She’s beautiful, smart, funny, and truly wonderful, and he marries her within a year of meeting her. They keep their own names, Magda is the last of her family, and wanted to continue her name. Erik is happy to help, and suggests that if they have kids, they use her last name, he's not attatched to his). Although he’s sad to leave Charles alone,he’s not alone for long, he meets a doctor named Moira, someone as smart and witty as he is. The two couples buy houses on the same street, enjoyed not only by Charles and Erik, but also Moira and Magda who had become fast friends. It was sad that a happy chapter of his life, living with Charles, their easy friendship, had ended, but he felt a new one coming on, one with Magda, with Charles, and the new baby Magda had just found out she’s expecting.

Pietro Charles Maximoff & Wanda Moira Maximoff are born on a rainy spring day, which Erik decides is one of the best of his life. His children, these two beautiful babies that he and Magda made, are so pure and wonderful, and he loves them more than anyone he has ever loved before.

His life is chaotic with two kids; something he wishes the parenting books had warned him about. Wanda is sneaky and cunning, she quickly learns all the skills babies need to learn, and always seems to aspire to learn more, to get ahead. She is easily able to outsmart Pietro, and occasionally even her parents. Pietro is always moving, he learned to run before he learned to walk, always running around the house. He runs into and crashes into things so often that Erik and Magda start sewing patches onto the elbows and knees of his clothes so he doesn’t go through them quite as often. Even when he isn’t moving, he’s always squirming or bouncing around, and talks too fast most of the time. Eventually, Erik and Magda learn to understand him, but Wanda seems to understand him much more easily than them, and often translates his high speed ramblings. When the twins were two, Magda announced that she was having another baby, and nine months later Erik meets his second daughter, Lorna Dane Maximoff, the spitting image of her father; sharing his brown hair and bluish gray eyes, and has the same look on her face as he often has on his own, one announcing: “I am so done with this shit.”

Charles stays a constant in his life, him and Moira are trying to have kids themselves. When that proves difficult, they adopt two boys, a 3 year old named Alex and a newborn named Scott. Alex and the twins end up becoming fast friends, the three of them often banding together to get into mischief and cause mayhem for their parents. Erik is happy for them, and happy that his children will have such wonderful playmates to grow up with. He occasionally misses his time with Charles, just the two of them, living their lives with peace and contentedness. Fatherhood is chaos, three (occasionally 4 or 5) children underfoot is bound to create that, but as much as he likes quiet and solitude, he would plunge himself in a pit of chaos if it meant he could have the love he has for his family.

His happiness never lasts for long, it would seem. Magda dies in childbirth with their fourth child, who they planned to name Nina. He holds his wife’s hand as she fades away, and gets to hold his third daughter for a few minutes before she too, passes. He leaves the hospital that day a different man, one who lost not just his wife and daughter, but a part of himself, one who actually believed in happy endings.

Those next few years are hard. He still has his other three children to care for, who lost their mother and sister. He does his best, and luckily Pietro and Wanda are old enough to be able to do some things themselves. They’re wonderful kids when they aren’t arguing or annoying him out of his mind. Lorna’s only 6 when her mother dies, and Erik does his best to protect her from anything that could hurt her. She’s perceptive however, and she sees the way Erik tears up when he looks at pictures of Magda, the way he flinches when he hears mothers calling out for their children.

The children, ever the wonderful people he raised, make the effort to cheer him up. Lorna rips out pages from her copies of highlights she thinks he’d enjoy, and she finds rocks and shells (where she found shells in upstate New York, he’ll never know) and gives them to him, and he ends up using some to make jewelry which she insists he sells for “a thousand million dollars!” Wanda and Pietro try to help out around the house, and at one point try making him breakfast in bed, which ends with maple syrup and ketchup on the ceiling, but he doesn’t bother asking questions because he already knows the answer: Pietro. All three children make cards and handmade gifts for him on holidays. Wanda’s are very neat and poetic, and she draws flowers and happy people and puppies and kittens on them. Pietro gives him messy ones with minimal drawings that have lots of text, things Erik cannot read because Pietro’s handwriting is messy and indecipherable. Lorna uses lots of stickers (she has a collection thanks to Moira, who encourages her artistic aspirations) and bright colors, and her cards are massive, she often tapes a few pieces of paper together to make a monstrosity of glitter, stickers and crayon drawings.

Thank god for Moira and Charles, the two seem to make it their personal mission to make his life easier, Erik and the kids have a standing invitation to dinner on the weekend, and Moira takes the kids out on day trips when she finds the time (she claims she does it because she doesn’t have any daughters and it’s fun to have “girl time”, but she also brings the three boys). When Wanda starts puberty, Moira offers to give her the talk, also giving him advice on how to handle and and help Wanda during her monthlies. She also helps to plan the twins’ B’nai Mitzvah, and goes with Wanda buy her dress, a deep red colored dress with layers upon layers of chiffon, which billow out when she spins around (He makes her a tiara of sorts, a delicate headpiece with garnet stones to match her dress, and she adores it, saying it makes her feel like a princess). She does the same when Lorna is at that age (she gets a mint green satiny dress, and he makes her a necklace out of jade) and treats Pietro like one of her own boys. They trade off carpool days, and often share the more annoying parts of parenting like PTA meetings (he almost has to hold Moira back during some of those meetings, she gets aggressive when the other parents say snobby things about her children).

Charles is always there for Erik, he comes over, sits with Erik and tells him about the annoying people he has to deal with at the university, and Erik finds Charles’ very British way of describing people he doesn’t like hilarious. They play chess (they have a tally of who has won, collected over over 1000 games over a decade of playing, and they use it to settle disagreements over petty things) they talk about their children’s lives and problems (Erik has gotten to the point where he’s actually interested in updates on the drama between two of the twins and Alex’s classmates, whose lives seem to be straight from a bad sitcom), and they generally enjoy each other’s company.

His kids seem to grow up so fast, before he knows it Wanda and Pietro are twenty-five, Lorna is twenty-three, and he moves to Hell’s Kitchen (he finds that name hilarious for some reason) to be closer to Wanda, who is working as a therapist at a practice, and is dating a man named Vision. He finds the young man peculiar, (what kind of a name is Vision anyway?) but he’s kind, and he adores Wanda, so Erik holds him in the highest esteem. Lorna is studying art at a school in Manhattan, and comes to visit often, and Pietro is a writer for some Chicago newspaper (Wanda sends him an article he wrote about his childhood, and it makes Erik tear up the way he talks about how wonderfully his dad raised them). He’s so proud of his kids, his favorite articles Pietro writes are carefully preserved in a scrapbook Erik keeps on the coffee table, a copy of Wanda’s PhD certificate is framed on his wall along with a picture of the two of them at her graduation, and pictures of Lorna’s art pieces are stuck up on the fridge, as well as a few of her actual paintings hanging around the house.

He buys a storefront that he turns into Maximoff Craft and Hobby, which he finds he highly enjoys doing. He hires a young woman named Raven (some people call her Misty, he doesn’t understand why) to help out, and she sometimes bring her kids, but he doesn’t mind since the kids are cute and Raven is scary competent (and therefore very good at her job), even if she’s a little rude.

He talks on the phone to Charles, who is still in Westchester, working at the local university, and they call each other almost every day, and talk for at least an hour. He visits when he can, and makes sure to see Moira as well, who is in the hospital with bone cancer. He has pleasant talks with her, about life, about their children (she loves to tell him about Scott, who is a researcher at a lab that studies renewable energy and is engaged to a doctor named Jean, and Alex, who is an engineer), and Charles.

He doesn’t even realize that he loves Charles romantically until Moira points it out. She laughs at his failure to notice this after 50 years of knowing Charles, and tells Erik to take care of her husband.

She died later that day.

A few months later, Charles moves to Hell’s Kitchen, retiring from teaching (Although he does invest in the nearby private school that is deeply in need of reform, and he turns it into a proper school for kids who need a challenging learning environment but have difficulty in public schools). He tells Erik that he wants to be with his family, he wants to be home. It takes Erik a minute to realize that Charles is talking about him, and finds that he agrees. He never really thought of it that way, but he knows that Charles has found the right word for it. The simplicity of the word, sitting right in front of him, and he could never define it, could never find the word that was on the tip of his tongue for years.

Love.

**Author's Note:**

> The family trees in this universe are complicated af, and they will be further explored. 
> 
> Kudos, Comment, Tell me what you want to see more of.


End file.
